


all the king's horses

by kathillards



Series: diamonds in the sky [8]
Category: GARO: Gold Storm Sho, GARO: Yami o Terasu Mono
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Misogynistic Slurs, Non-Linear Narrative, dealing with guilt and self hatred, mentions of death/murder and non-consensual body possession, sexism in makai society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 12:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20008504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: She writes letters to Enhou in the margins of her spell notebook.





	all the king's horses

**Author's Note:**

> for week of toku ladies day 7: why i love rian. i wrote a love letter to her insecurities and her issues because that is how i express love for my fave characters :)

_all the king's horses and all the king's men  
couldn't put me together again_

Rian’s not a damsel.

She’s not. She knows how to fight. Knows how to protect herself. Knows how to—

_(“A girl should know how to protect herself, don’t you think?”)_

She knows how to protect herself.

“If anything,” she tells Ryuga, smoothing his hair out of the way of a bruise on his forehead, “ _you’re_ the damsel.”

Ryuga smiles at her. It’s like looking directly into the sun. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Rian presses salve onto his bruise and thinks, _Wouldn’t it be nice if—_

When Gald spits, “And he sent a _woman_ to do his work for him,” she slaps him without even really thinking about it. Sends him reeling so easily, it’s almost funny.

“I’m sick of your attitude,” she snaps, but she’s sick of a lot of things. She’s sick of a lot of people, and a lot of attitudes.

(She remembers telling Enhou to dress more like a woman. Sometimes, she’s sick of herself most of all.)

Before Ryuga, before everything, she sits in Burai’s house and watches Aguri poring over his books and asks him, “Do you think I’m a bitch?”

Aguri’s gaze flickers to her, more in mild curiosity than anything. “Not particularly. Why?”

“Because I go out with men a lot. And they buy me things. And,” Rian bites her lip, twists her new emerald ring around her finger. She’ll get rid of it by tomorrow. She has a new spell to work on. “And I’m not doing any of it for good reasons.”

“Saving the world is a good reason,” points out Aguri. “It’s about the greater good. What you do to one man is probably worth all the stuff you do to protect the city from Horrors.”

It’s the way he says _probably_ that sticks with her.

She knows the other priestesses don’t think very highly of her. If she hadn’t guessed from the way they whisper behind her back, she would have guessed from the night Takeru gets too drunk and flops over the couch and tells her, “You’re actually pretty cool. You know, for a—”

“For a what?”

Takeru shrugs, rolls over. “A slut.” He’s asleep before she can figure out a response.

Burai makes him apologize in the morning. He scratches the back of his neck and says, as earnestly as possible, “ _I_ don’t think you’re a slut. It’s just what…”

She knows what they say. She knows they think Makai magic is meant to be used for good and pure purposes only. That Makai priests are supposed to stay with their knight and fight Horrors and not indulge in the world of humans any more than they have to. She knows the code of conduct better than anyone.

“But I don’t have a knight,” she tells Burai one sleepless night. “I don’t have a partner.”

“Being partners is about trust,” Burai says. “You have to be willing to let someone in.”

Rian spends a long time thinking she doesn’t know how to do that, before Ryuga shows up.

“Did you know,” she whispers to him, under a starry sky, the two of them camping far away from any hints of civilization, “I used to talk to you, when I was a kid. When I was all alone, through the scrying pool. You never heard me.”

Ryuga looks at her in quiet wonder. “You saw me?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” Ryuga’s smile widens. “It means we both weren’t as alone as we thought we were.”

It’s so hard to feel empty around Ryuga. He hears sounds nobody else does, feels emotions nobody else can see. He makes the world feel more full than it is.

When Jinga takes over, it’s like he cuts the string tying her to Ryuga. Snaps it off, leaves her floating, weightless in her own mind. Struggling against a current, always going the wrong way against the tide.

“She wants to live, like, so bad, man,” Jinga laughs through her voice. She’s up in the air, balancing on a high beam, begging Ryuga to kill her, and Jinga is unspooling all the layers of her heart she’d thought she’d tied up in a Gordian knot.

_He’ll never kill you_ , Jinga warns in her own head. _He’ll never do it. He doesn’t have the guts._

It doesn’t take guts to kill your best friend.

_He killed his mother_ , she wants to scream. _He killed his mother and I watched him do it and I—_

Jinga only laughs. _You’re not his mother. He can’t live without you._

She wants to tell him he’s got it backwards, but she never gets the chance.

Afterwards, she spends a lot of time thinking about what she would have done, in Ryuga’s place.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

Ryuga looks at her as if she’s grown a second head. “How could I kill you?”

“To save the world, you could’ve done anything,” Rian says.

“No.” Ryuga frowns. “To save you, I would’ve done anything. And I did.”

He makes it sound so easy. He makes it sound so easy to love someone. She doesn’t know if she deserves that kind of love. She doesn’t know how to make herself worth it.

Aguri had said it was a trade-off. One man for the world.

Ryuga had chosen one girl over the world.

She thinks about the girl she would have chosen, if she had gotten that kind of choice. If she had been strong enough to take it. If she had known how to save her.

She writes letters to Enhou, in the margins of her spell notebook, around the lists of ingredients and the names of obscure Makai rituals she’ll never use.

Well, it starts off with just Enhou.

_Dear Enhou,_

_I’m sorry._

_Love, Rian_

_Dear Enhou,_

_I miss you. I think I miss you more than I feel anything else._

_Love, Rian_

_Dear Enhou,_

_I wish you could’ve seen what we did today. I think you’d like it. I wish you_

_Dear Enhou,_

_Was it always just a trap? Was it all just the Madou Horror? Was there anything_

_Dear Enhou,_

_Sorry I wasn’t strong enough._

_Love, Rian_

_Dear Ryume,_

_Sorry you had to save me. You should have used it for someone else._

_Love, Rian_

_Dear Burai,_

_I keep hoping you’d be proud of me, but I don’t know if you would be. If you ever were._

_Love, Rian_

_Dear Dad,_

_I’m sorry that I_

She mails a real one to Haruna after a month on the road.

_Dear Haruna,_

_I know I said I would teach you more things. Sorry we had to leave. I think you’re a lot stronger than me. I think you know more than me about how to protect people._

_I hope things are alright back home. I think we’ll come back some day. I miss being some place that felt like home._

_Tell Gald not to give you a hard time. You’re way better than he is at all this priest stuff._

_Love, Rian_

She erases only one line from her last draft: _Sorry I couldn’t save you from everything._

She puts that one in another letter to Enhou instead.


End file.
